Derivatives
by BCooper
Summary: 10-year anniversary companion fic to 'Grave.' Takes place in Part I, somewhere between chapters 16 and 18. Cannot be read as a standalone.


Louise plucked at the fraying edge of her skirt and thought about dinner.

A droning backdrop of American History propaganda punctuated her thoughts of _roast, so tender it near disintegrates in your mouth_ with melodramatic claims about glorious battles in the name of righteous capitalism.

Well. Louise knew a bit _too_ much about capitalism, if she did say so herself, and according to Jack she was 'damn _overflowing_' with righteousness. No need to take notes, this logic assured her. You got it down pat.

Maybe something simpler, still savory in its homeliness. Chicken noodle soup peppered with rosemary and parsley, onions soft and sharp under the tongue.

God, she oughta stop torturing herself. She never _starved, _none of them did. Louise scrounged up enough generally tasteless meals to keep everybody well fed, and Jack waltzed in with sneering aplomb at least once a week carrying the bloodied brown steak bags he spirited away from his miserly former employer. If he had no other skill in the world, the boy knew how to cook a hunk of meat.

Today wasn't Tuesday, though, and in point of fact Louise hadn't seen him last night. Louise woke before the sun to an empty bed, her bones aching with cold. The thought of her rote beautification process and her subsequent trek through darkened Gotham streets rested heavy in her throat. Before she pounded the pavement towards the bullet train that would take her into the city proper – and to St. Katherine's, posted at the edge of the Narrows like some gaunt Victorian Gothic martyr – Louise checked on Lola, resting fitfully in her room.

She wasn't _stupid_. She knew Jack went out, ran drugs, did terrible things, most like. Most nights. Louise looked enough like a virgin sacrifice to throw off the common riff-raff – enough, even, to fool her tortured lover – but she had a bit more sense than most people gave her credit for. Louise was no Mary, no Astraea, no Kore. She swore no vows and knew little shame. Some nights she bathed and saw dried rivulets of blood on the porcelain and knew that they were not the violent consequence of Lola's illness.

Louise had prayed to no God but Jack Napier for too long. She cared little for the fates of those faceless others, providing she found Jack fast asleep in their bed when she came home from school.

A tickle at the nape of her neck was followed by a muffled giggle several rows behind her. Louise touched the back of her head. From among poufy curls her fingertips unearthed a moist spherical object. Spitballs again? How '80s of them.

Louise flicked the wadded paper aside just as the clumsy tolling of the bell crackled through the antiquated P.A. system. Considering Louise had only bothered to take out her textbook in the barest concession towards educational responsibility, she was the first out of the classroom and into the cavernous, echoing main corridor.

"Sister Regina gets lazier and lazier with her ringing responsibilities, I swear." Sydney drawled to her left. Louise matched step with her friend. "Want a smoke before you take off?"

"It isn't nice to pressure your peers."

"Aw, c'mon, sweetie. We ain't got much time before we go our separate ways."

"You mean before you leave me to run off to Duke or Yale or whatever."

"_Some_ of us study for our exams," Sydney snipped back, smiling.

"I study. I'm just really stupid, you know? God spent too long getting my lips just right."

"You're so full of shit."

They both laughed.

As if of one mind, they traipsed to the annex. The windows were narrow and the ventilation poor in this most historic of wings, and the bathrooms, such as they were, were in such a constant state of disrepair that not even the Sisters deigned to sit their ascetic behinds on the germ-encrusted toilet seats.

Two girls were already set up on the ledge near the row of frosted glass windows. Another girl moved a towel out from beneath the door and yanked them in, then slammed the door shut behind them and reapplied the barrier in quick, economical jabs.

Louise knew all of them, though they weren't close. At most, she could say that they did not go out of their way to make her life hell. Their crowd was the hard-drinking, pill-popping kind, which wasn't novel to her and therefore held little interest. The girls paid her distant respect because they found her circumstances fascinatingly tawdry, and she paid them equal respect because they had the tendency to jump people who mouthed off to them. Unlike Jack, Louise cared enough to stay out of the line of a punch.

They liked Sydney, though, because Sydney smoked and drank like a fish. A round of cheerful greetings swept through the bathroom as Louise set down her backpack and positioned herself nearest the back wall, in between Ava Myers and Kelly Donahue. Kelly was repinning her perfectly flat-ironed sheet of white-blonde hair while Ava sniffled into a mascara-smeared tissue. Up on the ledge, Gina Kolias flicked a crumbling bead of ash from the tip of a joint into a glass jar smeared opaque with resin.

Sydney used the sink basin as stepping stone to climb up beside Gina and lit her cigarette. They spent a minute passing it back and forth, their ears pealed for the sound of comfortably-soled shoes smacking against cobble.

"Hey, Speller, I saw you around the neighborhood the other night. You were with that guy—the blondish one. What's his name?" Gina smirked at her with hooded, calculating eyes.

"Why do you want to know? What were you even doing there?"

"Getting this." She waggled the quickly-diminishing joint in between two fingers. "Is he your boyfriend?"

"Yeah."

"No shit." Kelly and Gina exchanged a sly look in the mirror. "When I asked about him, my dealer got all _scared_. Said he's crazy and that anybody running with him is, too."

Sydney interjected blithely, "Maybe your dealer's just chickenshit, honey."

The girls all laughed, even Gina.

Once the mirth died down, Louise passed the cigarette to Kelly and replied, as if unbothered, "He's got a low tolerance for nonsense and a knack at winning fistfights. That doesn't make him crazy."

"Hey, he's wicked hot. I just think it's funny."

"What is?"

Kelly opened a tube of eyeliner and began meticulously applying a dark, knife-tipped wing to the outer edges of her eyelid. "We all thought you were, like, Gidget or something. We'd have invited you to more parties if we knew you liked it like _that_."

"You can come to one tonight if you bring him. We'll be upstairs at that pub on Olivier."

Louise knew that place. It was where rebellious posers from the Palisades went to get wasted with opportunistic kids from the Narrows. The barkeep made a killing slinging liquor to under-aged debutantes who proceeded to lose all their pocket money at rigged card games. The idea of either her or Jack spending time there almost made her laugh aloud, it was so preposterous.

"Thanks, but we're, you know, otherwise indisposed tonight." She flashed a bright, toothy, insinuating grin at Gina and then turned to Ava with a softer expression. "Hey, do you have gum on you?"

After two sticks of wintergreen and several spritzes of Calvin Klein perfume, she and Sydney sneaked out of the bathroom. The soft nicotine rush made Louise feel airy and truant.

Outside, the day had warmed to a tolerable temperature and the sky had opened up, vivid-blue and puffed with cumulus clouds. The ground squelched beneath the soles of her shoes as she traipsed across the front lawn, only half-listening to Sydney gossip about the reason Ava had been blubbering.

They separated at the parking lot, Sydney swinging towards her white Mustang and Louise heading in the opposite direction for the bus that would take her to the bullet train. As she waited, she pulled out her history book and read the chapter she had been too busy to read the night before, then took the practice exam after and got most of the questions right. The same could not be said of her practice math exam, however.

When she arrived home, she unlocked the front door with the key hanging from her necklace. Jack was sitting on the kitchen counter rehanging one of the cabinet doors. A peanut butter sandwich rested on a paper plate by his knee. The cabinet had been broken for probably the entire time she'd been coming to his apartment, but she wasn't in the business of questioning Jack's moods. She stood on her tiptoes and kissed him lightly on the cheek in greeting.

"Hey, can you help me with my math homework? I'm going to flunk out entirely if I can't pass this stupid exam tomorrow."

"What's it on?"

She passed over the practice exam, the paper so smeared with the shadow of partially-erased wrong answers as to be uniformly gray. He bit off a mouthful of his sandwich and then raised one eyebrow at her in pointed chastisement.

"_Really_?" He gestured with his pinky. "You're kidding me with this seventeen. What are they teaching you at that school?"

"To keep my legs closed and my cross on."

"Then you've failed at everything. C'mere. Where's your pencil?"

Despite having stopped attending classes ages ago, Jack could still run circles around her in mathematics and the natural sciences. Part of this could be attributed to the teaching style of the Sisters heading those departments. Jack didn't loom over her in full nun's habit and demand the answer to number twenty-three in a classroom full of her sniggering peers, firstly; secondly, he always sat extra close to her and explained exactly what he was doing as he did it, including all the little mind tricks he used to cheat his way around a problem. She suspected he enjoyed it, even when it inconvenienced him, because it served as a reminder that he hadn't dropped out of school for want of brains.

They moved to the kitchen table. He pulled up a chair beside her and started working at a problem, then slapped down the pencil and sniffed her hair.

"Where have _you_ been? You reek."

"Excuse you."

"You smell like weed and cigarettes."

"I do not. I smell like Calvin Klein."

He rolled his eyes and snapped, "Stop bumming around with that hillbilly. She'll never invite you to her sweet sixteen, no matter how often you inhale her secondhand smoke."

"We're both older than you," she retorted, sidestepping his comment. She didn't smoke often but it was something she considered indisputably her own little secret. Louise figured every girl ought to have at least one. "And I'll have you know that I did get invited to a party tonight. You did, too. You wanna go?"

Jack turned his chair so that it was facing her straight on and crossed his arms across his chest. He pressed his tongue against his inner cheek and fixed her with a flat, challenging stare.

"Oh yeah? Whose party?"

"Gina Kolias. Her dad represented that linebacker, Magnus Brewster, in his domestic battery case."

"Golly gee, I'm plum _jazzed_. Do we get to put on our best duds and hang out in her daddy's boathouse?"

"It's at the L-23 on Olivier."

He slapped his knee and burst out laughing. It was a committed, tooth-baring, full-throated thing, and there was nothing so incandescently lovely in all the rest of the world. Louise stared with her head propped up on her hand, her body awash in the radiant light of her own happiness.

"You," he said, pointing at her, "are killing me today."

"It must be the contact high," she teased.

"Don't push your luck. Now stop giving me eyes and pay attention."

Lola woke up when Louise had only three questions left to go. She trudged over with a flowered wool blanket wrapped around her shoulders. It had been ages since she felt strong enough to get up unassisted and _walk _somewhere, even somewhere so close as the bathroom, and the mood lifted immediately because of this minor miracle. Jack kicked out a chair across the table for Lola to sink into and then went back to tearing up the remainders of his sandwich crusts into little pieces, pretending to be unaffected.

"I'm bored," Lola opined, sighing.

"Yeah, so am I. You gonna finish this question sometime this century?"

"Why don't you help her? She ain't got any eraser left."

"What do you _think_ I've been doing."

"It _looks_ like you been tearing the crusts off your sandwich like a little baby."

"Can you two," Louise interrupted, "stop bickering? I'm working through it in my head."

Jack and Lola traded a look so imbued with recondite sibling symbolism that Louise threw down her pencil and announced, "I'm taking a shower!"

"I'm not finishing this for you," Jack called out after her. "Hey, I'm not, so you'd better be thinking about derivatives in there!"

"I definitely won't be," she returned over her shoulder, just sweetly enough to drag a blush out of him.

It always thrilled Louise to strip off her uniform. There was something insubordinate about standing topless in her plaid and pleated skirt. Kinda antithetical, which she bet was a word Jack didn't know despite how fast he solved her math problems. She tugged off her knee socks and turned on the shower to let the water get hot. The pipes screeched something unholy and began a devilish clamor in the walls. For just a few minutes, she let herself imagine living in an apartment without an unreliable hot water tank and rust stains on the porcelain tub, then she yanked off her panties and stepped in to wash that traitorous thought away.

After about five minutes, the door opened with a soft _click_. Louise pressed her palms over her face to suppress her smile. Her skin went numb and then very, very hot.

"Is that you, Lola?"

"You know it's not."

She could see his outline through the flimsy white shower curtain, which meant he could see hers, too. He braced his hands against the edge of the sink basin. The cant of his chin showed that he was looking straight at her.

"Let me ask you something. And don't laugh."

"Okay."

Even though he had broached the subject, it took almost a full minute for him to clear his throat and begin unburdening his mind.

"Do you, ah . . . Do you wish we went to parties? Together?"

Louise remained motionless. It felt obscene to take up the bar of cheap soap and bathe herself with him in the room. It was the first time he had ever busted in on her while in the shower, despite their living nearly on top of each other all these years, and the intimacy was so astoundingly new and unprecedented that it rendered her a trembling deer in bright, hot headlights. That he had done so just to ask her this silly question in the somber tone of somebody confessing a sin confounded her.

"You know I was just joking about the L-23. That place is mortifying."

"Yeah, _that_ place is. I'm talking about – You know what? Nevermind. It's stupid. See you."

Louise almost slipped on her way to yank back the shower curtain. She used both hands to keep her body obscured as she peeked her face around the plastic. "Wait a second. Don't go."

The bathroom door swung shut again. Jack kept his hand poised on the knob, his face averted as if in deference to her modesty.

Or maybe it was just because he was blushing all over and couldn't stand for her to see it.

"I'd love going anywhere with you," she admitted. "But I'm not sitting around all day pining over the malt shops we're not holding hands in. All I want is to spend time with you and Lola, and I'm happy as a clam. Promise."

A muscle in the far corner of his jaw twitched. He dropped the hand holding the knob and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

"Can I get in with you?" he asked, so quietly she hardly heard him over the water striking the tub basin.

"You sure you can handle seeing me naked?"

"Done it before," he returned archly. He finally looked at her straight on, her gentle taunt pulling him back from that inward place he went to, sometimes, when his mind raced full-throttle towards hopelessness. "How'd I handle it then?"

"Really well. Full marks."

That drew a smile from him, small and brief though it was. Louise ducked out of sight and listened to him undressing, her heart pounding madly.

Louise could tally up the times they'd seen each other stark naked on a single hand, with three fingers. All three times, they'd been having sex. And, boy, did she ever _not_ get tired of repeating _that_ to herself. Sometimes she spent an entire class with her chin in her cupped hand, thinking about sleeping with him. Literally the entire lesson plan gone, poof, not a single droning syllable registered. She had to keep her legs crossed because it made her ache just remembering how it had all gone down.

They weren't in the habit of casual nudity yet. Seeing him naked still made her nervous. Her mouth went bone dry, which couldn't be said of the rest of her.

The curtain pulled back, rustling as the rings scraped along the metal rod. Louise couldn't decide if she would rather he get an eyeful of her front or her back, so she split the difference and turned sideways. She kept her arms crossed negligently over her chest. Because she didn't want him to catch her with her eyes averted after the tease she'd given him, Louise squared her shoulders and tossed what she hoped to be a saucy, worldly sort of look in his direction.

Then stalled, because Gina Kolias was right: Jack _was_ wicked, wicked hot.

"Eyes up here, pervert," he chided.

Louise made an indignant sound and smacked her knuckles against his stomach. He caught her easily by the wrist and tugged her right up against him, then stepped them both backward. Louise yelped and ducked her head out of the way of the stream.

"I'm trying not to get my hair wet!"

"Uh, _why_?"

"It's not my day to wash it."

This statement crumpled his brow into such a state of perplexed annoyance that Louise dropped her head against his chest and burst into giggles.

"Jesus Christ, guys are clueless."

"Hey, isn't that what you _do_ in the shower? You know . . . _wash_?"

"Sure, but my hair's really thick. It doesn't need to be washed every day – it gets all brittle and starts splitting at the ends."

Jack hummed speculatively. He looped his arms around her shoulders and buried his fingers in her hair. The elastic tie slid loose, spilling riotous curls. It fell to the tub with a plop and started soaking up water.

Then he cupped her face and tipped her head back into the stream, soaking her roots clean through.

Louise spluttered around a mouthful of water. "Jack! You jerk!"

"Wait, it's a science experiment. Look how heavy and straight it's getting. It's almost to your waist already." He moved his hands down her spine and tickled where the tips of her sodden hair now reached, bare inches above the small of her back. "Just here."

When she rubbed her eyes clear, she caught him staring at her with his lips parted and his own eyes half-lidded, glazed. Their hips remained locked snugly. He was impossibly hard against her lower belly, and it was damn near all she could think about.

"It's so black. It's like it's swallowing up the light," he marveled. His thumb smoothed away a damp curl of baby-hair sticking to her brow. "How do you carry all this stuff around every day?"

"Habit, I guess." Her voice faltered. She licked her lips. "It's my one concession to vanity."

"It's a good one."

"Thanks. What's yours?"

"My winning personality."

Louise laughed. "Come on. Tell me."

"There's nothing to tell."

"You've got to be smug about something. And _don't_," she cautioned him sternly, "you dare say what I think you're going to say."

He pressed his hand against her back to arch her closer. Rivulets of water sluiced in corkscrews down the flat plane of his abdomen, then caught the join of their skin and continued down her thigh. "Hmm. I'm not sure what you mean."

Louise shivered. "I'm talking about stuff like your eyelashes—"

"Eyelashes," he repeated, smirking.

"—or your arms—"

He made a noncommittal noise.

"—or your lips—"

"All utility."

"You're impossible," she groused, pinching the skin over his ribs. "Okay, here's the cincher."

"Hit me."

"Your hips." She let her hands slide down to them, where the skin was feather-soft and pale and spotted with hidden freckles.

"That's the PG-13 version of the _first_ thing I wasn't allowed to say."

"Come on!"

"Listen, this might blow your mind here, but I actually don't spend any time thinking about how _pretty_ I am. All I care about is whether you want to keep messing around with me."

"Is that what we're doing? _Messing around_?"

Jack kissed her, open-mouthed, with his hands supporting the smooth curve of her spine, her neck. The weight of her body was as nothing in his arms. The muscles in his biceps tightened beneath his skin. It was only ever when he held her like this that she remembered how much bigger he was, and the disparate proportions of their bodies threw her mind into some wheeling, chaotic, neon-flashing feedback loop.

Louise whimpered soft and pathetic in her throat. Breath tickled her lips as he pulled infinitesimally away.

"Nah," he whispered. He rested his brow against hers and swallowed thickly. "It's definitely more than that."

The general dewiness of her skin kept the tears beading at the corners of her eyes a merciful secret. Just in case, she rolled onto the balls of her feet and covered her mouth with his. He still tasted like that peanut butter sandwich.

He pressed her shoulder blades up against the poorly-grouted shower tile, then hiked her up to wrap her legs around his waist in one smooth movement. As soon as he did it, he dropped his eyes as if startled at his own presumption. Only the softly-quavering corner of his mouth displayed his nerves.

"Is this all right?"

Louise nodded, about two miles past the destination marker for 'Speechless.' She let her head loll back against the cold tile and squirmed into some neater, interlocking position. Jack readjusted his grip on her legs.

The playful, exhilarated atmosphere of a minute ago dissipated entirely. They were clinging to each other so tightly that she could feel the thick beat of his heart reverberating through her own chest.

Louise couldn't quite understand how it was, exactly, that every time they did this, she wanted him more. Certainly there had to be some line drawn in the sand, some threshold over which they would eventually cross into routine equilibrium. All she knew was that they weren't even close to reaching it, and this knowledge both thrilled and frightened her.

What their position lacked in smoothness and comfort it made up tenfold in lewd novelty. She bit down on his shoulder as they finally, _finally_ fidgeted their way into a sweet spot. Some hiccuping gasp left her throat. Jack groaned and rested his brow against her collarbone. She curled her fingers around a fistful of his damp hair and exhaled in short, sharp pants as he began, tentatively, to move.

Jack trembled violently against her throughout it all. Blotches of high color stained his cheeks. His eyelids had glossed over with mist. The apple in his throat bobbed futilely around whispery, near-inaudible exhortations, and Louise answered him with her own unpracticed encouragements. She couldn't even tell if it was embarrassment or arousal at what they were murmuring that made her burn. A little bit of both, feeding off the other, maybe.

First her, shameful-quick, and then him straightaway, the minute he realized. After the blackness receded from her peripheries, Louise dropped her legs to stand, knees jelly. Her ears had popped. The water pelting down around them was piercing cold against their flushed skin.

Louise stroked a hand down Jack's back, his heaving sides. He kept his face nestled against the curve of her throat.

"Do you have anywhere to be tonight?"

He shook his head. When she drew his face around, his jaw set stubborn and resisting, his eyes were huge and wet. He flicked them away and wiped his nose with the back of his hand once, sniffing. The tone of his voice was too raw to be casual, even working at it as desperately as he was. "You want me to get pizza and a movie or something?"

"Sure. That sounds nice."

They rinsed off, hissing at the frigid temperature, then dried and dressed. Jack shrugged on his ubiquitous jacket at the door. His fingers flickered just once, scarcely-noticeable, over that hidden inner pocket where he carried the gun he didn't think she knew he had. Lola had dredged up some serviceable purple nail polish with sparkles and began wheedling Louise into letting her paint her toes.

On the kitchen table, her math homework sat finished. He'd even mimicked her handwriting.

* * *

**A/N: **This is dedicated with boundless devotion to my readers, particularly those of you who are still showering love and support on _Grave_ so many years down the road. Ten years! I mean, God. I still fucking love you all. I read all the reviews and PMs, even if I can't always respond to them.

Special shout-out to the **Guest** reviewer who clued me in that I was bypassing the ten-year anniversary of my baby; **pools-of-sorrow-waves-of-joy**, who showed me the first fan-edit of my work ever (I liked them with my personal Tumblr beginning with U, if you're reading this, and they bring me so much happiness, I'm serious); and **Strawberry Flames**, who was the final prod I needed to finish this companion fic.

So have this fluffy, marginally smutty interlude between our tragic couple. I've always wanted to play around with a POV from Louise during Part I of the story, because so much of her is filtered through Jack's (admittedly skewed) interpretation of her. I wanted to showcase a bit of her time at St. Katherine's, the dynamic with her peers, and more of a loose, friendly, playful dynamic between her and Jack than we got during the heaviness of later-stage Part I. Please forgive any continuity issues you may spot, hawk-eyed devotees that you are.

It's been a while since I've written these two, and my style has changed since then. I hope that they read authentically, nevertheless. Please enjoy!

XX ~ BCooper


End file.
